They are all moments in the history of the Industrial Revolution, at which clashes and conflicts suddenly show themselves with extra clearness, (Location 190)
Note: a useful analysis of narrative and beats - the white door - don’t force the theory too much - let the feelings and context do the talking
The conflict of animism and materialism (Location 198)
Note: these two are my concern here but the others run alongside them
The conflict of the expropriated individual with his environment (Location 198)
In treating separately the Trades Union, the political-historical, the social, the economic sides of the Industrial Revolution, the writers have themselves simply perpetuated the law of division of labour. (Location 203)
Note: see kpunk’s citing the monetisation of the missel-thrush
It would take a large work on its own to show, in the great period of English poets 1570–1750, the desperate struggle that poets had to keep poetry head into the wind: to keep it facing life. But by 1750 the struggle – like that of the peasants – was over. In other words poetry has been expropriated. (Location 218)
Note: a Marxist view, obviously. see also Benjamin on Leskov
But in a process (conflict) which culminated between 1660 and 1880 the peasants were destroyed and the land capitalised – the power of money – capital – substituted for the power of the Crown and the religion. (Location 225)
Man as we see him today lives by production and by vision. It is doubtful if he can live by one alone. (Location 259)
Note: what then is the vision? may it provided like a mechanistic I vision of he future
But in fact the factory man is living on the vision of others and the Buddhist Yogi on the production of others. (Location 264)
Note: see above
I do not propose to ask the obvious next question ‘What then is the place of imagination in the world of today?’ I prefer to inquire what may have been the place of imagination in the making of the modern world. (Location 271)
Note: this is in some ways the same philosophical urge as the medieval scholastics - ie the same form of humanism.
Suggestion: when these ideas, scientific and mechanical, began to be exploited by capital and to involve many human beings, was not this the period of the repression of the clear imaginative vision in ordinary folk? And hence for its being possible for them to be emotionally exploited, e.g. by Wesley? (Location 1069)
Note: the conversion of the imprisoned imagination to non-conformist religion?
Upon so potent a help as these two last-mentioned Inventions a Waterwork is by many years experience and labour so advantageously by me contrived, that a Child’s force bringeth up an hundred foot high an incredible quantity of water, (Location 1080)
Note: disproportion of effort required to achieve things (in this case allowing child labour)
The idea that living creatures are machines is in these years gaining ground. God is admired as an inventor or engineer (Location 1179)
and the scientists are in the god-like position of being able to create machines which are like living creatures. The analogy which begins with insects, whose movements are compulsive, is not at first openly continued up to man, the animal with a soul. But the distinction is dropped in practice, or blurred, when human labour begins to be organised on a ruthlessly rational basis. (Location 1180)
Note: (multiple) humans as organic machine, or perhaps like water containers of a force to be channeled.
Compard sound and light and shewd how light produced colours in the same way by confounding the pulses. Eat cake and cheese, bread, ale and claret. Walkd hard to Garaways. Met Hammond drunk. he denyd to meddle with theater. Another with him. Cacao Nutts. From The Diary of Robert Hooke (Location 1281)
Note: sure I’ve shared this before. still makes me laugh.
The diaries of Hooke, Pepys and Evelyn are the diaries of realism, connected with the novel, and later with poetry, as in the case of Smart, Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Hopkins. The weather is important throughout (the weather in the Englishman’s soul), weather equalling the soul outside the body: ‘My tables, meet it is I set it down.’ (Location 1292)
‘Universal Character’, as proposed by John Wilkins, whose ‘Essays towards a Real Character (Location 1296)
Note: and read also the Renaissance self fashioning n/m - this is character to do with writing obv.
which vibrations (like those of sound in a trumpet) will run along the aqueous pores or crystalline pith of the capillamenta, through the optic nerves into the sensorium; (which light itself cannot do) (Location 1313)
Note: they keep me dark
Compare the argument of ‘golden letters’ from Cicero, de Natura Deorum quoted in The Wisdom of God by John Ray. And compare William Blake, ‘The atoms of Democritus and Newton’s particles of light’. (Location 1388)
22 THE EDUCTION OF LIGHT December 13, 1685 (Location 1391)
Now as to the Grandour of London, Would not England be easier and perhaps stronger if these vitalls were more equally dispersed? Is there not a Tumour in that place, and too much matter for mutiny and Terrour to the Government if it should Burst? (Location 1401)
Wherefore – leaving itt to God to punish the sin of women who become with Child against his Comandments, and leaving it to the world to punish such women with Contempt & Dirision, & leaving it to the women themselves to suffer for their folly in not oblidging the men they deale with to provide for their Children, – Lett the Government in humanity make provision for every woman with Child for 30 days, the woman leaving her Child to be a servant to the Government for 25 yeares, suppressing the names of their parents. (Location 1416)
Note: the use of humans a sort of force or castle.
Animism, indeed, seems to be drawing in its outposts, and concentrating itself on the first and main position, the doctrine of the human soul. This doctrine has undergone extreme modification in the course of culture. It has outlived the almost total loss of one great argument attached to it, – the objective reality of apparitional souls or ghosts seen in dreams and visions. (Location 8333)
